High summer digest: startups in Eastern Europe

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Despite the notion that startups are hard work which does not stop for weekends or holidays, the opposite seems true: as the high summer is here, Facebook is full of holiday photos and the flood of startup news has turned into tiny trickle. So here is the summary of the trickle.

Fast Lane Ventures is now into network marketing. In collaboration with German Springstar, it has developed a service called Juvalia&YOU, for Russian, Brazilian and Indian jewelry fans to sell jewelry socially. The concept is similar to Tuppeware parties it seems, or what is known in Germany as Schmukpartys. The internet part of the business is in selling starter kits for the ‘stylists’.

Over the past few days there was another incubator WannaBiz opening up in the black sea port Odessa, Ukraine, according to Dennis Dovgopoly’s blog. The incubator will invest in mobile and web startups focusing on Russian and CIS markets. It will accept applications until the 14th of September. Evgen Sysoyev, the managing partner of the new venture fund Aventures is one of the mentors.

In Russia the company online music streaming company Yota discontinued its music service according to RBK Daily. It could not compete with the websites which offer music streaming service for free either legally (Yandex Music) or illegally (Vkontakte). Yota follows the example of other music streaming services such as Omlet (now video streaming portal Stream) and Fidel.ru which has seen 120,000 unqiue daily visitors but could not come near to profitability. Good luck to Deezer then, which entered the Russian market a few months ago.

IPG Photonics, a legendary fiber optic laser corporation which was founded by the Russian scientist Valentin Gapontsev and is now a publicly traded American enterprise, has bought back its equity stake in IRE Plus from the Russian government-owned venture fund Rusnano for $55,4 million dollars. Rusnano realized 27 percent return on the investment.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.